It’s been a couple of days since the tragedy in Connecticut, and as the fog of disbelief, confusion and anger has begun to wear off, it is being replaced by the predictable calls for greater preventative measures.  For some, its stronger gun control.  For others, its more widespread security measures in schools, or greater funding for mental health services.  By and large, most of what is being articulated represents political and governmental solutions.  There is no question that government plays a role in public safety, and there may be value in exploring greater regulation in this area.  However, it is clear to me that there is something else our country needs a greater amount of: love.

We live in the seemingly most socially connected culture in the history of the world, and yet there are so many that experience such a profound sense of loneliness or insignificance that they are driven to terrible acts that will bring attention to their pain.  They are among us, and yet we willingly turn a blind eye to what they go through.  I am not advocating the need for another government program because I wonder if, deep down, we are hoping the government provides the answer so that we don’t have to be bothered.  What we are facing is a spiritual problem no law has the capacity to fix. I am talking about getting down and dirty in the margins and standing in the gap for someone who is hurting.  The way we demonstrate love is not through fixing each other, but through bearing with one another and carrying each other’s burdens.

Many are asking where God was in this situation.  I think God has the right to ask us the same question.  I think He has the right to ask us why we drive past the woman on corner begging for money for food.  I think He has the right to ask us why we ignore the children in our neighborhoods who we know do not have good role models.  I think He has a right to ask us why we ask people how they are doing, and secretly hope they don’t tell us the truth.

I am sure there will be some sort of government intervention as a result of this tragedy.  There will be a big news conference, a bill signing at the White House, and we all will feel safer knowing that government has stepped in.  But it won’t change the brokenness in our world.  It won’t change our need for God and for each other.  And it won’t change that fact that there will be hurting people on the margins who will act out of their desperation in ways we will never be able to prevent.

Would love have prevented what happened in Connecticut?  We will never know.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, because no law can replace the investment one life makes in another.

Have you ever received a vision for your life that was so powerful, you knew it had to be from God? The kind of vision that kept you up at night with excitement and anticipation?  The kind that inspired thoughts of the future and sent you scurrying for paper and pen every five minutes as new ideas relentlessly flooded your brain?

I have had these kinds of visions, and they are phenomenal.  I have had visions that I was convinced were of God and were the key to unlocking the next stage of my destiny.  I have even taken the initial steps I thought were necessary to see those visions become reality.

But, then, real life happens.  I get busy.  Other pressing demands on my time come to the forefront. Soon, the excitement turns to discouragement and the anticipation turns to stress.  The vision that seemed so real has now become merely a distant possibility, and attending to that vision has become a burden I long to shed.  Eventually, I throw up my hands, and I let the vision die.  Every so often, something reminds me of that vision, and I am filled with regret for what could have been.

It does not have to be this way.  We do not have to live lives of regret.  Our visions from God do not have to die.  But we do.

In marriage, we are told that the needs of our spouse come before our own, that we must put to death our will so that the good of the marriage will be upheld.  In doing so, we are comforted by the fact that we are not doing this alone, that there is also our spouse, who is submitting their will as well.  We are partners in the pursuit of the kind of marriage God intended for us to have.

If marriage is an earthy example of the relationship God desires with us, then, in the same way, we are called to put to death our will in favor of the journey God wants to take with us.  If our most vital relationship is the one with our Heavenly Father, then the vision He gives us must take precedent over all else.  However, we can take comfort that God is our partner in the vision He gives us, and if He called us to it, He will see us through it.

So what do we do when life happens, when all the other demands on us choke out our passion for our vision, and we begin to lose faith?

We need to trust the vision, and not the “facts,” those things that make us think the vision is impossible.  If the vision is big enough, the facts do not matter, and ultimately, they will change.  When we order our lives by placing our discipleship first, everything else begins to fall into place.

When Jesus fed the 5000, He did not feed them out of abundance, but only out of what the disciples had.  When He gives us a vision, He does not ask us to give out of abundance of time, talent, or treasure.  He only asks to give out of what we have.  In doing so, much like the bread, He breaks us of our preconceived notions of what life should look like, and then He multiplies our lack into an abundance by which others are impacted for the Kingdom.

That’s not to say that things won’t be hard, we won’t face challenges, and we will always see the clear way forward, but if we die to ourselves and what we want our lives to look like, none of that matters.  What matters is that, out of devotion to Christ and a passion for the lost, we have died to ourselves so that the vision God has given us will live on.

What visions have you let die? Are you willing to seek the Lord for a new vision, one that you will pursue to fruition, no matter what the cost?

If you ask most experts in the restaurant industry, they will tell you there really are only three factors that determine the success of a restaurant: food, service, and price.  The old conventional wisdom in the industry was that you only really needed to excel in two of those areas.  For example, if your food and service was spot on, you could afford to charge more then the next guy and people would still come. As the economy has soured, that paradigm no longer applies.  In order to be profitable and successful, restaurants must be able to balance quality food, consistent service, and value of price.

Churches today face a similar scenario.  If we look for qualities that create an environment for true discipleship to take place, we find that it really only takes three: passionate spirituality, authentic community, and missional zeal.  A study of the Acts 2 church would support this.  However, many churches, regardless of size, typically only possess two, or even just one, of these qualities.

A church may have passionate spirituality in their worship and authentic community through small groups and Sunday School classes, but they lack missional zeal.  This church will likely remain a small body of believers who never truly realize their potential to reach the lost.  The church down the road may possess that missional zeal along with the same passion in worship, but there is no sense of community, and so while they may attract large numbers, the back door to the church is just as wide as the front.  Yet another church may possess a heart for mission and deep community, but lack any kind of passion in their spiritual lives.  These are the churches where social justice takes precedent over theological integrity, and the power of God never really operates in the midst of human effort.

To fulfill the call to make disciples of all nations, churches need to start acting like restaurants by evaluating how they are doing in the three facets of discipleship.  Is the worship, regardless of musical style, passionate and life-giving? Does it practice true community where needs are met and people are growing in the knowledge and wisdom of the Lord?  Does the DNA of the church include a passion of reaching the lost not by attracting them to a service, but really meeting them where they are at and earning the right to be heard to share the Gospel?

Much like ineffective restaurants that fade in a sour economy, churches are fading because of the sour spiritual economy in this country. The answer is not to co-opt or embrace culture, nor is the answer to fight against it.  The answer is to create a new culture in the church in which people are welcome regardless of where they are in their spiritual journey and invited to find their way back to God by believers who practice true and balanced discipleship.

I am back from England, but still a LOT to say about what I saw and learned in Sheffield and what it means for the church in America.

Several years ago, I took part in a short-term mission trip with a youth group I was leading to Tizimin, Mexico.  That area had just been ravaged by a hurricane a few months prior, and so our crew was going down to help with the clean-up effort.  Lacking any real skills that would be useful on such an endeavor, I, along with our group, was assigned to a painting crew, and driven over to a building used for education by a local church.  We painted the building, the classrooms, and each other.  To be honest, it looked God-awful, but the locals were appreciative.  They even brought us apples for a snack.  Twenty-four hours later, we all had Montezuma’s Revenge.  Maybe they weren’t so appreciative.

Apart from the illness, it was an overall positive experience.  I got to see some pretty deep poverty, go shopping in an authentic market, and lend my “skills” to an area that needed help.  We even stayed in Cancun at a resort for a night to unwind.

But as we travelled back to the States, I couldn’t overcome the feeling that this was not the experience I thought it would be. Sure, it was a fun trip, but I wouldn’t exactly call it transformative, and I don’t think, for the most part, our students would disagree.  There was something missing, something that I had not been able to figure out, until now.

We went on a mission trip, but never did any actual mission.

Part of the disconnect may be in the definition.  Most churches define mission work as finding a really poor area of the world and trying to fix the problems going on there.  Now don’t get me wrong, that is a very noble goal, and we should be in the business of doing that.  However, if it is not done in the context of advancing the Gospel and making disciples, its not truly mission work.  At least not how the Bible would define it.

When Jesus told the disciples they would be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judah, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, what He was really doing was defining different people groups the Body of Christ was to reach with the Gospel.  Jerusalem represented the immediate surroundings, the people who were geographically close and demographically similar to the disciples.  Judah represented those who were demographically similar, but who occupied different geography. Samaria represented those in a different geography with a fundamentally different culture.  Going to the ends of the earth, well, who knows what those people would be like?

In today’s society, Acts 1:8 might look something like this (at least for me): “You will be my witness in Toledo, the U.S, The West, and even as remote as the Amazon Jungle, or the African Desert.”

The problem with how churches view mission is that the farther away a mission field is, the more interested they are in what is happening.  It’s not uncommon for a church to support missionaries to Africa, short-term missions to Haiti, and a church plant on the other side the country, but do nothing to promote missional outreach in their own backyard.  Simply telling church members to invite their friends to service does not count as mission.  I’m not saying these are not worthy causes.  Its just that it lets too many of us off the hook for doing the work of mission in our Jerusalem.  We tell ourselves that God is not calling us to California, or Haiti, or Africa, and so we write the checks and say our work is done, all the while, our neighbor might be struggling to keep his marriage together, or the coworker is hurting from the loss of loved one, or college student who once was active in youth group as a teenager has not been seen in church in over a year.

All three need the love of Jesus and the hope of the Gospel, but they seldom receive it because we don’t understand what mission really is: activity that seeks to bring the Kingdom of God to those outside of a faith in Christ with the expressed purpose of reaching them for Jesus.  There is nothing wrong with going and painting a school building in Mexico, but what is that doing to advance the Kingdom? Is it really mission, or simply volunteerism?

I am not advocating we abandon the Judahs, the Samarias, and the ends of our worlds.  What I am saying, and what I think Jesus would say, is that our churches need to pay just as much attention, if not more, to our Jerusalems.  As individuals, we may never be able to reach beyond our backyard, but does not mean we can’t reach within it, and at the end of our lives, when we stand before God and give an account, I am firmly convinced that He will ask us, “What did you do with your Jerusalem?” My prayer is that our churches take seriously that question, and that they will not go another day without an answer.

I am back from England, but still a LOT to say about what I saw and learned in Sheffield and what it means for the church in America.

There is an assumption in the church in America that ministry operates based on the “80/20” rule.  This rule states that 20% of church members are taking on 80% of the work.  It’s based on something called the “Pareto Principle,” but in many church contexts, that gap is much wider, and so the 80/20 ratio is often seen as a target level of involvement to aspire to.

However, when a church settles on 20% of its members being involved in ministry, it is abdicating responsibility for the discipleship of the other 80%.  The problem in our existing church culture is that we have separated discipleship from the responsibility to be involved in service for God’s kingdom.  We think that because we go to church, read our Bibles, pray, have Jesus bumper stickers on our cars, and listen to Christian music that we are His disciples.  All of these things are great, but if our spiritual growth stops there, we would be like the guy who stuffs himself with food every day but never exerts himself physically.  We would grow spiritually, but in a way that is unhealthy and out of balance.

The reason I believe the church struggles with this separation is a failure of leadership.  Leaders in the church have become consumed by the three B’s:  butts, budgets, and buildings.  We believe that if we only got people through our doors, they would hear the message of the Gospel, get saved, and become fully engaged in our ministry.  While we may have the noble motivation of seeing souls saved, deep down we hope that would mean gaining more financial donors to support the ministry objectives, and lead to a need for larger, more impressive facilities that would inspire more of those outside of the church to come in, which would start the process all over again.

If we follow this line of thinking, we might be able to draw big crowds and build big buildings, but we will likely fail and the only true measure of effectiveness Jesus gave us: our ability to make disciples who make disciples.  Willow Creek Church found this out a few years ago when they learned how little they were truly accomplishing in spite of the crowds they had attracted.  Therefore, we must find a new system of doing church that does not involve a focus on the three B’s.

Before you start looking for the answer, you need to start with a question.  Are you willing to scrap your entire paradigm for doing church in order to embrace the Jesus paradigm for reproducing disciples?